Wordpress Maintenance – Swift Website Updates & Maintenance

Have you been maintaining your websites AODA compliance?

Simon Browning — Thu, 12 May 2022 20:19:39 +0000

Was your website created to be AODA compliant? Is it still compliant?

Did you know that any time you make a content update to the website – that is add text, a picture, a video, etc. – there are things you should be doing to maintain your AODA compliance?

AODA is the Accessibility for Ontarions with Disabilites Act, which for websites requires that public-facing websites for organizations of certain size meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA criteria.

Here are some of the things you can do to help maintain your websites compliance

Ensure that every image that has been added to the site has an “alt” description.

This allows visually impaired visitors who use a screen reader to understand what the image is about.

Make sure there is sufficient contrast between background colours and foreground text.

WCAG 2.0 level AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. There’s a great tool where you can check contrast at https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Check your headings.

Ensure your page headings and labels are informative and well structured (h1 followed by h2, etc.). More on this at: https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist#sc2.4.6

Some tools to help

There are some excellent tools available for checking compliance which will also provide guidance on what is broken and what needs to be fixed. Some examples are:

AChecker Web Accessibility Checker: add a page and it will scan it for you. There are options for the level of accessibility you need to meet. In Ontario it is WCAG 2.0 AA
Wave: They also have browser extensions so that you can check as you work on your site.
Deque: Another browser based tool
Accessibe: Select “audit your website” from the Compliance menu. They also offer a widget that does some live front end adjustments to your website and provides users with additional accessibility tools.

And if you’d like to know more specifically about AODA: https://www.ontario.ca/page/how-make-websites-accessible

You don’t have to do this on your own.

We’ve assisted many clients with their AODA compliance, both when the site is launched and by re-checking after time has passed. We’d be happy to discuss and work with you as well.

Please contact us if you’d like more information.

Best Way to Add Video to your Website

Simon Browning — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 20:48:57 +0000

A question that often comes up from clients who are managing their own sites is “What is the best way to add video to my website?”

While adding video to WordPress is quite straightforward, and Divi makes it very easy to do, our general recommendation is to embed it from a third party site, like YouTube or Vimeo whenever possible.

There’s a few reasons we recommend this approach:

Video Optimization: Often times when clients send us a video to add to their website its gigantic. 50MB in size, 100MB in size, or even larger. If you place a video of this size on your website every person who views your site needs to download that entire video. That may take a long time and chew up their data limit if they’re on a cell phone.

Hosting Account Bandwidth and Storage Space: It may also impact your web hosting account. Most accounts have a bandwidth limit – that is an amount of traffic the account is permitted per month. When the limit is reach the account may be suspended or additional billing may apply. If you have 1000 people view a 100MB video, thats a lot of bandwidth – about 100 GB. You also need to store the video in your account, and there is likely a limit on your storage space as well.

What can you do?

Reducing the size of the video isn’t too difficult if you have the software and are familiar with the process (we use Handbrake for reducing video size). If you’re receiving the video from a studio you can ask them to prepare a web version of it for you.

If you don’t want to worry about that though, you can upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo and it will take care of the optimization for you, automatically adjusting the quality of the video based on the viewing conditions/speed of the person watching, and I can’t think of anytime it will send out a 100MB video.

YouTube is a free service, and if you don’t have one already you can create a company channel where all your videos live. This can provide an additional means for new clients to find your business. Did you know that 3 billion people search for videos on YouTube each month?

In summary:

The reasons we recommend embedding video from YouTube or similar instead of placing it directly on your website are:

you you reduce the effort of optimizing the size of the video
you’re not taking up storage space in your hosting account, potentially saving money
you’re not consuming bandwidth displaying the videos, also potentially saving money
not mentioned above: YouTube, Vimeo, etc. stay on top of technology changes, so if new video formats come out your videos are automatically adjusted to them (for example, when mobile)
most importantly: you may well be giving clients a more satisfying experience on your website.

I updated my web page, why can’t I see the update? It’s the cache.

Simon Browning — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 22:11:33 +0000

Have you ever updated your website – or been told that your website has been updated – but you don’t see the change? You refresh or reload the page but still don’t see it? Most often this is due to you seeing an old copy of the page (the cached version) not the live page, and just refreshing the page won’t show you the changes. To see the change, the cache needs to be cleared.

What is the cache?

Essentially the cache is a saved version of the web page.

Which cache needs to be cleared?

Generally speaking there are two caches: 1 in the website and 1 in your web browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.).

After a site update both need to be cleared. The server cache is most often cleared by the web developer/editor (and/or it may be automatic). The web browser cache needs to be cleared by anyone trying to view the changes shortly after they have been made if they have viewed the pages recently (given a few hours the browser caches should clear themselves).

The web browser cache

When you visit a web page your web browser (chrome, internet explorer, etc.) downloads a copy of it and stores it in its local cache on your computer – so that when you re-visit a page that you have already seen it can be shown to you more quickly.

When you view a web page your browser looks to see if it already has a copy of the page, and if so it shows you that copy of the web page, instead of downloading a new version from the website. This is usually much faster to load because its coming from your own computer, rather than over the internet.

The web browser is supposed to check with the website to see if there is a newer version of a page, or if its version of the page has become stale (cached pages have expiry dates). This doesn’t always happen though, and sometimes you have to force your browser to update – you have to clear your cache. Chrome for example can sometimes be very sticky. Hitting Control F5 when viewing a web page is also an instruction to the web browser to fetch the version from the website (as opposed to clearing your cache), although this also sometimes doesn’t work immediately.

The website cache

Today, most websites – and certainly WordPress site – are database driven, so when someone visits your websites home page the web server says: “ok, go get me the top of the page (the header), the images for the page, the text for the page, the footer, etc.” and then it puts together the page to show to the visitor.

All those request for bits and pieces take a bit of time, so once the page has been created the website caches – saves a copy of the complete version of the page for a few hours so that the next person who views it doesn’t have to wait for it to be put together; there is already a complete version ready to be displayed. This does mean that anyone viewing your web page may be seeing a version from a few hours ago.

These cached versions are usually deleted automatically every few hours – depending on the site settings – but sometimes you may want to have the cache updated right away, particularly if it is a time/date oriented change. Some hosting platforms will even try to detect when information is changed on page and update them as soon as a change is detected – this isn’t necessarily perfect though, particularly when it comes to style or coding changes. Site editors will often also have a way to force the clearing of the server cache.

Who clears the cache?

Mostly the folks who clear their caches are site editors and owners: and they may be clearing both the server cache and their browser cache, particularly when making changes and updating pages.

It’s not uncommon for site editors to make a change to a web page, but other people to not see the change right away. To see the update they may need to either wait long enough for the cache(s) to expire, or force an update in their web browser.

Visitors to your website generally won’t know anything about caching – they’ll either see an old version of a page or a new one (its supposed to be a new one).

How Do Clear Your Cache?

Elegant Themes has a great post on their site on this topic, including instructions on how to clear the cache in many browsers.

How Investing In Website Maintenance Is An Investment In Your Business

Swift Updates — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 04:15:03 +0000

Getting your new website up and running is like welcoming your customers to a stylish new building. You’ve made an investment in the construction and things are running smoothly, clients are finding and using your site to contact you, and you are proud of how everything looks and works.

With time though new and improved website features that can attract or engage clients become available, and parts of your site might begin to break down – not necessarily because there is something wrong with them, but because technology on the web moves so rapidly. Hackers love to find out of date websites and use them to send spam.

Rolling up your sleeves to fix the plumbing or the wiring of your website probably isn’t the reason you decided to open a business in the first place. Hiring a team to carry out the maintenance jobs not only lets you focus on your own work but ensures that things function as best as possible so that new and current customers arrive to an informative and secure environment.

A website maintenance plan can help you ensure that customers and prospects have a positive experience on your site and that you stay on top of security updates. It can be a valuable investment for your business or organization. Here are three ways a plan can contribute to your business.

1. Customer Experience

The last thing you want for your business is for customers or prospects to become frustrated when trying to find the information they need to make decisions. Changes to web browsers like Internet Explorer or Chrome, and changes to other websites can impact a users experience on your website. It is vital to be sure that when a customer clicks on a link it takes them to the desired place and its easy for them to read. (Have you come across any teeny tiny websites on your phone lately? In the last few years most websites were updated to be responsive, but there are still a few out there that try to squeeze the desktop view down onto a phone).

Oh, and don’t forget to update your content! Information in your industry may change rapidly and the data that you have on your website may become outdated sooner than you think. Regularly updating your content is a clear signal to your visitors (and search engines like Google) that your website is active and up to date. Ideally a maintenance plan will include a provision for content updates, in addition to the security and technology updates, so you can just email in your updates and the site gets update for you.

2. Sales Impact

Being able to get their questions answered is essential for your customers to take the steps to buy your products or hire your services. With a website maintenance plan your site should be continually monitored to ensure that it is up and running and to make sure that contact forms and other methods of contacting your business are working properly so that you do not lose any leads.

In the last week alone we’ve had 3 non-maintenance plan clients contact us about the following:

one client’s website had been down for 10 days and they hadn’t noticed (how many possible clients may have noticed though?). Their hosting company had made an update which broke their website.
a new client’s website had been shut down by their hosting provider because it was sending ‘phishing’ emails, and had hundreds a fake bank login pages hidden in a directory – their site had been hacked. When they realized the problem they found us by searching google for website maintenance
a third client’s shipping function on their website had stopped working when the courier updated their system. The client contacted us because someone had emailed them to let them know they couldn’t complete their purchase. They hadn’t received an order in 3 days and thought it must have just been the time of year

In all cases we were able to resolve the issues and get the sites back up and fully functional, but who’s to say how much business might have been lost? In the long run a small investment in maintenance will pay off for your business.

3. Security

Let’s face it, hackers out there are hard at work every day presenting us with increasingly complex new threats. They don’t even have to target your website specifically, but rather they run automated robots that scan the web looking for outdated code. Once they find a website they can use the robots then break into them and set them up to send spam or set up fake ‘phishing’ websites within your own site. Applying the latest security updates to your content management system (CMS) avoids leaving your website wide open to their attacks and ensures that your information, and that of your customers, is secure.

Whichever route you wish to pursue to keep your website in top shape, remember that the company that you choose to assist you is really an extension of your team, a specialized task force. It is there to free you up from having to remain vigilant over these details so that you can spend time with your clients and focus on what you do best: your business.

Still have questions?

Please feel free to contact us for more information or discuss your specific requirements. We offer website maintenance either on an ad-hoc basis or via website maintenance plans.